What is Yoga Nidra?
The benefits of deep relaxation
What is Yoga Nidra? It roughly translates as “yogic sleep”. It is a deep relaxation technique to help boost energy levels and enhance creative thinking. It gives the mind a chance to rest and rejuvenate. There are many benefits to practising regularly. So what are the benefits exactly?
Firstly, it promotes relaxation. Focusing your awareness on the body helps the mind to relax and slow down. Noticing how the body is feeling, rather than thinking how the body is feeling, can also calm the mind. This helps to make us feel more relaxed. By promoting our self-awareness, we develop our interoception skills. In turn this improves our ability to sense our own needs and respond appropriately. Ignoring our needs has been linked to eating disorders and depression.
We need time to defuse, to contemplate. Just as in sleep our brains relax and give us dreams, so at some time in the day we need to disconnect, reconnect, and look around us.
– Laurie Colwin
In addition to promoting self-awareness, this practice can promote emotional regulation. By providing us with a safe space to observe emotions and feelings objectively, we don’t have to respond immediately. Practising this technique makes us appropriately respond and regulate responses to ever-increasingly stressful environments. In essence, it makes us better at socialising with others.
Related: How to Slow Down
As Yoga Nidra helps with improving sleep, it also helps with improving memory function, too. When we sleep, our short term memory is processed into long term memories, meaning we are more likely to remember things from the previous day after a good night’s sleep. As it places our brain into a sleep-like state, this memory processing also happens during this practice. Our minds are treated to the manay benefits of deep relaxation, and as a result, we remember more!
It also helps us to be kind to ourselves, as well as others. Just listening to the body, without thoughts like “I need to be more this or less that” improves feelings of self-compassion. The external world is a constant pressure of making us feel that we are not enough. We are constantly bombarded with unhelpful thought patterns such as “you need this…” or “without this, your life is meaningless” etc.
Listening to our inner critics can empower us to understand where these thoughts arise from and Yoga Nidra gives us the space to choose whether we wish to listen to them or not.
Related: Yoga Practice for anxiety
There are not just mental benefits to Yoga Nidra, but physical ones too. It soothes the nervous system, lowers cortisol production and reduces blood pressure. In combination, these all help to improve our immune systems and reduce inflammation.
Yoga Nidra can help to promote a healthy sleep routine
Yoga Nidra can also improve sleep. Yoga Nidra improves sleep by placing the brain into a state that is similar to when we are in deep sleep. Learning to consciously relax can help the body to drop off to sleep more easily. If you wake up in the night, the tools that Yoga Nidra provides can help you to fall asleep again.
Related: Learn more about Yoga Nidra here
So if you want to learn to relax more, be kinder to yourself, and improve overall mental and physical health, why not try Yoga Nidra for yourself!
Learn more…
Francesca teaches Yoga Nidra by-monthly online. Learn more about the next event here or check out my NEW Yoga Nidra Club for access to a library of quality Yoga Nidra Classes to play whenever and wherever you wish!
Related: Try my FREE Yoga Nidra Taster (video)
